Feldman's Faves: May 9, 2022

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

We have an exciting week ahead of us. Our summer students are starting today, which is always a fun part of the Goodmans year – special welcome to PJ, Jeffreen and Noah – we are very pleased to have you in our section look forward to meeting you and working with you this summer. It turns out, that we will actually be able to do this since we are scheduled to have our first NON-ZOOM section meeting (and lunch) for the first time in over TWO YEARS, on Thursday. I am looking forward to seeing everyone who can make it. There is remote option if you would like to join on that basis as well.

I am not dumb enough to say anything about the Leafs so I won’t….

BTW, for those of you who may be struggling with Duotrigordle, my daughter Noa suggested using the following five words to start as a hack that will guarantee success: Jumpy, Brick, Glent, Waqfs and Vozhd. Start with these words and you cannot fail….Good luck!!

No theme this week, just topics of interest.

THE GIFTED SCHOOL – By Bruce Holsinger – I had never heard of Bruce Holsinger but when I read a review of The Gifted School in the NYT Book Review 2019. I bought this book and it just sat on my night stand for years. After reading some serious and difficult to handle books over the last few weeks on very difficult topics, I decided I needed something a little lighter so I started reading, and once I started I didn’t stop. However, while this book is an easy read, the substance is actually quite serious. As one reviewer says, this book is, “Smart and juicy, a compulsively readable novel about a group of friends and families that is nearly destroyed by their own competitiveness when an exclusive school for gifted children opens in the community. This deliciously sharp novel captures the relentless ambitions and fears that animate parents and their children in modern America, exploring the conflicts between achievement and potential, talent and privilege. Set in the fictional town of Crystal, Colorado, The Gifted School is a keenly entertaining novel that observes the drama within a community of friends and parents as good intentions and high ambitions collide in a pile-up with long-held secrets and lies. Seen through the lens of four families who've been a part of one another's lives since their kids were born over a decade ago, the story reveals not only the lengths that some adults are willing to go to get ahead, but the effect on the group's children, sibling relationships, marriages, and careers, as simmering resentments come to a boil and long-buried, explosive secrets surface and detonate. It's a humorous, keenly observed, timely take on ambitious parents, willful kids, and the pursuit of prestige, no matter the cost.” When my kids were growing up it seemed that every family I knew had at least one “gifted” child, which statistically speaking just can’t be right (but what do I know). This novel is very effective at uncovering an unbelievable phenomenon of today’s child raising culture and the resulting stress and strain that both parents and kids are under to “be successful” - and then you wonder why we are experiencing the mental health crisis that we are experiencing these days (that started long before Covid). The Gifted School is a good snapshot of life in our time and a reminder (in a very entertaining way) of the dangers we all face in the child raising “nuclear arms race” many of us are experiencing. Here is a good review from the New Yorker magazine - https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-a-novel-can-unmake-the-myth-of-meritocracy

TED TALKS DAILY - We can make COVID-19 the last pandemic | Bill Gates – Bill Gates strongly believes (rightly or wrongly) that the Covid 19 pandemic could be our last pandemic. To achieve this lofty objective (or pipe dream depending on your view), Gates believes that putting the proper plan in place in advance is the key to success. He looks at fire prevention from ancient Rome as a model, in that prior to creating a fire department, Rome had no coordinated plan in place to deal with future fires, so they implemented a system of creating fire alarms, ensuring easy access to water and having a department in charge to be ready if needed. Well, there still are fires today, so you can see that this is not a perfect analogy but let’s go with it for the sake of argument. Gates contends that to avoid future pandemics we need a team of experts in place that is on standby called the GERM Team (Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization), which will be their full time job and whose sole priority is epidemic prevention and containment. He envisions the GERM Team consisting of a diverse set of experts (scientific and medical, logistics experts, and those with communication and diplomacy skills) and that this will cost over $1 B/year to administer and will be run by WHO. He also thinks the team along with each country should be doing pandemic response drills on a regular basis (like fire drills) and in low times of crisis focus on prevention (e.g., by strengthening local health systems). He also emphasizes that the first 100 days of a pandemic and how we respond in that crucial period makes all the difference and can stop most of the damage, which is what we failed to do with Covid. Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself: “Building a pandemic-free future won't be easy, but Bill Gates believes that we have the tools and strategies to make it possible -- now we just have to fund them. In this forward-looking talk, he proposes a multi-specialty Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization (GERM) team that would detect potential outbreaks and stop them from becoming pandemics. By investing in disease monitoring, research and development as well as improved health systems, Gates believes we can "create a world where everyone has a chance to live a healthy and productive life -- a life free from the fear of the next COVID-19."https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ted-talks-daily/id160904630?i=1000558398868

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon